* * * * *
I woke with a singular sense of feebleness and exhaustion, and turning
my dizzy eyes---beheld the walls and furniture of my own chamber in
London. Asmodeus was seated by my side reading a Sunday newspaper--his
favourite reading.
"Ah!" said I, stretching myself with so great an earnestness, that I
believed at first my stature had been increased by the malice of the
Wizard, and that I stretched from one end of the room to the other--"Ah!
dear Asmodeus, how pleasant it is to find myself on earth again! After
all, these romantic wonders only do for a short time. Nothing like
London when one has been absent from it upon a Syntax search after the
Picturesque!"
"London is indeed a charming place,"--said the Devil--"all our
fraternity are very fond of it--it is the custom for the Parisians to
call it dull. What an instance of the vanity of patriotism--there is
vice enough in it to make any reasonable man cheerful."
"Yes: the gaiety of Paris is really a delusion. How poor its shops--how
paltry its equipages--how listless its crowds--compared with those of
London! If it was only for the pain in walking their accursed stones,
sloping down to a river in the middle of the street--all sense of idle
enjoyment would be spoilt. But in London--'the hum, the stir, the din of
men'--the activity and flush of life everywhere--the brilliant
shops--the various equipages--the signs of luxury, wealth, restlessness,
that meet you on all sides--give a much more healthful and vigorous
bound to the spirits, than the indolent loungers of the Tuileries,
spelling a thrice-read French paper which contains nothing, or sitting
on chairs by the hour together, unwilling to stir because they have paid
a penny for the seat--ever enjoy. O! if London would seem gay after
Paris, how much more so after a visit to the interior of the Earth.
And what is the news, my Asmodeus?"
"The Theatres have re-opened. Apropos of them--I will tell you a fine
instance of the futility of human ambition. Mr. Monck Mason took the
King's Theatre, saith report--(which is the creed of devils)--in order
to bring out an opera of his own, which Mr. Laporte, with a very
uncourteous discretion, had thought fit to refuse. The season
passes--and Mr. Monck Mason has ruined himself without being able to
bring out his opera after all! What a type of speculation. A speculator
is one who puts a needle in a hay-stack, and then burns all his hay
without finding the needle. It is hard to pay too dear for one's
whistle--but still more hard if one never plays a tune on the whistle
one pays for. Still the world has lost a grand pleasure in not seeing
damned an Opera written by the Manager of the Opera-house,--it would
have been such a consolation to all the rejected operatives,--it would
have been the prettiest hardship entailed on a great man ever since the
time of that speaker who was forced himself to put the question whether
he had been guilty of bribery, and should be expelled the House, and had
the pleasure of hearing the Ayes predominate. _Je me mête_ with the
affairs of the Theatre--they are in my diabolic province, you know. But
if the stage be the fosterer of vice, as you know it is said, vice just
at this moment in England has very unattractive colours."
"Ah, wait till we break the monopoly. But even now have we not the
'Hunchback?'
"Yes; the incarnation of the golden mediocre: a stronger proof, by the
hyperbolic praise it receives, of the decline of the drama than even the
abundance of trash from which it gleams. Anything at all decent from a
new dramatic author will obtain success far more easily than much higher
merit, in another line; literary rivalship not having yet been directed
much towards the stage, there are not literary jealousies resolved and
united against a dramatist's as against a poet's or a novelist's
success. Every one can praise those pretensions, however humble, which
do not interfere with his own."
"It is very true; there is never any very great merit, at least in a new
author, when you don't hear the abuse louder than the admiration. And
now, Asmodeus, with your leave, I will prepare for breakfast, and our
morning's walk."
"Oh, dear, dear London, dear even in October! Regent-street, I salute
you!--Bond-street, my good fellow, how are you? And you, O beloved
Oxford-street! whom the 'Opium Eater' called 'stony-hearted,' and whom
I, eating no opium, and speaking as I find, shall ever consider the
most kindly and maternal of all streets--the street of the middle
classes--busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation. Ah, the
pretty ancles that trip along thy pavement! Ah, the odd country
cousin-bonnets that peer into thy windows, which are lined with cheap
yellow shawls, price £1. 4s. marked in the corner! Ah, the brisk young
lawyers flocking from their quarters at the back of Holborn! Ah, the
quiet old ladies, living in Duchess-street, and visiting thee with their
eldest daughters in the hope of a bargain! Ah, the bumpkins from Norfolk
just disgorged by the Bull and Mouth--the soldiers--the milliners--the
Frenchmen--the swindlers, the porters with four-post beds on their back,
who add the excitement of danger to that of amusement! The various,
shifting, motley group, that belong to Oxford-street, and Oxford-street
alone. What thoroughfares equal thee in variety of human specimens! in
the choice of objects--for remark--satire--admiration! Beside the other
streets seem chalked out for a sect,--narrow-minded and devoted to a
_coterie_. Thou alone art Catholic--all receiving. Regent-street
belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk, whose characters
are above scandal. Bond-street belongs to dandies and picture-buyers.
St. James's to club-loungers, and young men in the Guards, with
mustachios properly blackened by the _cire_ of Mr. Delcroix; but
thou, Oxford-street, what class can especially claim thee as its own?
Thou mockest at oligarchies; thou knowest nothing of select orders!
Thou art liberal as air--a chartered libertine! accepting the homage
of all, and retaining the stamp of none. And to call _thee_
stony-hearted!--certainly thou art so to beggars--to people who have not
the WHEREWITHAL; but thou wouldst not be so respectable if thou wert not
capable of a certain reserve to paupers. Thou art civil enough, in all
conscience, to those who have a shilling in their pocket;--those who
have not, why do they live at all?"
"That's not exactly what surprises me," said Asmodeus; "I don't wonder
_why_ they live, but _where_ they live: for I perceive boards
in every parish proclaiming that no vagrant--that is, no person who is
too poor to pay for his lodging--will be permitted to stay there. Where
then does he stay?--every parish unites against him--not a spot of
ground is lawful for him to stand on. At length he is passed on to
his own parish; the meaning of which is, that not finding a decent
livelihood in one place, the laws prevent his seeking it at any other.
By the way, it would not be a bad plan to substitute a vagrant for a
fox, and, to hunt him regularly, you might hunt him with a pack of
respectable persons belonging to the middle class, and eat him when he's
caught. That would be the shortest way to get rid of the race. You might
proclaim a reward for every vagrant's head: it would gain the King more
honour with the rate-payers than clearing the country of wolves won to
his predecessor. What wolf eats so much as a beggar? What wolf so
troublesome, so famished, and so good for nothing? People are quite
right in judging a man's virtue by his wealth; for when a man has not a
shilling he soon grows a rogue. He must live on his wits, and a man's
wits have no conscience when his stomach is empty. We are all very poor
in Hell--very; if we were rich, Satan says, justly, that we should
become idle."
I know not how it is, but my frame is one peculiarly susceptible to
ennui. There's no man so instantaneously bored. What activity does this
singular constitution in all cases produce! All who are sensitive to
ennui do eight times the work of a sleek, contented man. Anything but a
large chair by the fireside, and a family circle! Oh! the bore of going
every day over the same exhausted subjects, to the same dull persons of
respectability; yet that is the doom of all domesticity. Then
_pleasure_! A wretched play--a hot opera, under the ghostly
fathership of Mr. Monck Mason--a dinner of sixteen, with such silence
or _such_ conversation!--a water-party to Richmond, to catch cold
and drink bad sauterne--a flirtation, which fills all your friends with
alarm, and your writing-desk with love-letters you don't like to burn,
and are afraid of being seen; nay, published, perhaps, one fine day,
that you may go by some d----d pet name ever afterwards!--hunting in a
thick mist--shooting in furze bushes, that "feelingly persuade you what
you are"--"the bowl," as the poets call the bottles of claret that never
warm you, but whose thin stream, like the immortal river,--
"Flows and as it flows, for ever may flow on;"
or the port that warms you indeed: yes, into a bilious headach and a low
fever. Yet all these things are pleasures!--parts of social enjoyment!
They fill out the corners of the grand world--they inspire the minor's
dreams--they pour crowds into St. James's, Doctors' Commons, and Melton
Mowbray--they----Oh! confound them all!--it bores one even to write
about them.
Only just returned to London, and, after so bright a panegyric on it,
I already weary of the variety of its samenesses. Shall I not risk the
fate of Faust, and fall in love--ponderously and _bonâ fide_? Or
shall I go among the shades of the deceased, and amuse myself with
chatting to Dido and Julius Caesar? Verily, reader, I leave you for the
present to guess my determination.
* * * * *